Advances in electronic communications technologies and devices have interconnected people perhaps better than ever before. To illustrate, mobile phones, which were previously used for voice communications only, are increasingly being used to transmit photographs, video, audio, and/or other content and messages to other mobile phones and to other types of electronic devices.
To assist people in communicating with one another, many communication devices include local address book applications that allow users of the devices to manually input and manage locally stored contact information for people. Such local address book applications have several shortcomings, however. For example, locally maintained address book data can easily become obsolete when contact information for a person changes and the user responsible for maintaining the local address book is unaware of the change or fails to manually update the local address book. As another example, a user may possess several devices each having its own local address book application. It is often time consuming, inconvenient, and/or costly to manually maintain and synchronize address books across multiple devices. In addition, when a user upgrades to a new device, transfer of local address book data to the new device may be time consuming, inconvenient, and costly.